“Reclaiming Travel”
Duke University Press, $23.95
This quite brilliant little book by Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison begins appropriately with a quote from that quintessential nomad Robert Louis Stevenson: “There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only who is foreign.” The authors address two issues — why we travel and how we travel — and then ask: Is there a difference between travel and tourism? “We travel, in part, because we are restless,” they suggest. They further contend that the human desire to travel has much to do with the idea of home. Our experiences connect us to a place. “Venturing out into the world is frightening.” It is (usually) safer to just stay home. And yet we choose to travel. Stavans and Ellison explore the mystery of travel, both past and present. In the past, travel meant “exile … searching, exploration, conquest, commerce.” Today it has more to do with pleasure and entertainment.
Travel and memory “walk hand in hand,” they offer. For this reason, most travel writing doesn’t happen on the road but only when the author has had time to digest the experience. “Travel writing is a form of thinking aloud.” Here they recall the great travel writers, the great innovators, of past (Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West) and present (Rebecca Solnit, John McPhee).
Travel is serious business. But, as the authors remind us, the word itself has its roots in the word “travail.” Tourism, on the other hand, is typically associated with leisure, and yet part of the thrill in “taking a vacation” is leaving something behind, “shirking some responsibility.” They explore the idea of the grand tour and the birth of mass tourism, invented by that great temperance advocate Thomas Cook. They discuss the expansion of global tourism, the advent of a new kind of tourism — Space Age entrepreneurs — the fake travel experience (such as the artificial amusements found at Disneyland, “a kingdom of controlled happiness”) and even “disaster tourism,” best exemplified by Katrina tours.
They address, too, the dark side of tourism. Tourism has consequences and can leave an indelible mark on a place: Landscapes and cultures are altered by our very presence. “What makes an ugly tourist out of a nice person?” they ask. For someone like the Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid, tourism smacks of colonialism. Reclaiming travel, they conclude, is a matter of perspective. “Being a traveler is something we can aspire to at all times,” they write. “Learning to be better travelers might also help us become better citizens.”
“Hidden Tuscany: Discovering Art, Culture, and Memories in a Well-Known Region’s Unknown Places”
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, $26.99
Tuscany is among the most popular regions in the world, so author John Keahey had his work cut out for him when he set out to uncover “hidden” Tuscany, the places that most people pass through on the way to somewhere else. Specifically, he was searching for places “for a tourist to become a traveler.” He intentionally chose to avoid Florence, Siena and the Chianti area to concentrate on coastal Tuscany, its islands and several inland villages.
Given this is Tuscany, Keahey also was on the lookout for food that was unique to a particular place. In the village of Pitigliano, he comes across “the best tomato sauce for pasta I have ever eaten.” Poetry also is on his mind. In Viareggio he sips a morning espresso while contemplating the funeral of the great English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose “fish-gnawed body, with a folded copy of his late friend John Keats’ poems in an inside coat pocket,” washed up on the Italian shore after the sinking of his small boat. On an equally poignant note, he visits the village of Sant’Anna, where, in August 1944, the German army massacred nearly 600 villagers, mostly elderly men and women and children. (It’s the setting of Spike Lee’s movie “Miracle at St. Anna.”) And he even finds discoveries in the well-trodden city of Pisa.
It’s a new perspective on a popular region.
June Sawyers is a freelance reporter.